Entertainment

The Sisters of First Aid Kit on the MySpace Era and Going Viral

Welcome to Throwback Tunesday, where Mashable amplifies the echoes of music past. With genre trends and throwbacks, we synthesize music and nostalgia.

Swedish sister-sister duo First Aid Kit have music in their DNA. Johanna and Klara Söderberg’s father was guitarist and songwriter for rock band Lolita Pop, and the girls followed in his footsteps, singing and penning songs together from an early age. In 2007, the Stockholm-based siblings started to take things a little more seriously, and the world took notice. That year, the folkstresses' MySpace recordings caught the attention of The Knife'sKarin Dreijer Andersson, and in 2008, their cover of Fleet Foxes’ “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” went viral, propelling them into the spotlight.

Since this video (which has more than 4 million YouTube views to date), Johanna, now 24, and Klara, 21, have checked many things off their musical bucket list, including two albums produced by Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis — a longtime idol. Stay Gold, which dropped in June, was one of these releases, and the sisters will kick off a U.S. tour in late October.

We take a look back with the sisters to a time before they'd struck mainstream success: In the thick of the MySpace era and all its mirror selfie, Top Eight glory.

What’s going on in the photo?

Image: First Aid Kit

Johanna: First off, it’s highly embarrassing to share this photo. There were worse pictures, but this was actually the least embarrassing one. It’s from the summer of 2006, I was 15 and Klara was 13. This was the year before we started making music and we were going through a phase of rebellion, I think. So I shaved my eyebrows off, I cut my hair — you were a bit of an emo kid, Klara.

Klara: I still had long hair at this point, but just a couple of months later, I cut it really short and had fringe all over my face.

Sounds like the MySpace era.

J: This was in the MySpace era for sure, with the mirror. And Vampire Freaks. It’s really funny because at that time, I had a crush on a guy who listened to electronic, like German techno, and I completely changed my appearance so he would like me. But I said that once in an interview, and now it’s on our Wikipedia page that I’m really into German techno. A lot of our interviews ask about it.

K: It sounds like Johanna was always into it, but then I was like, “Oh no, let’s do folk music.”

J: It was just a short phase.

What led to creating music together? Did growing up around your dad’s music influence your own?

J: Our dad is a guitarist and songwriter for a band from the '80s. When I was born, he quit the band, so he was always jamming around with a guitar and playing music. And our mom is a huge fan of music, too.

K: Music was always around and we were always really interested. We were singing a lot — all the time. And then we found folk and country music and just fell in love with it. So we started writing our own songs.

Were you always making music from the time you were little?

J: We would always collaborate and we would have bands with our friends, write pop songs together. But it was around 2007, a year after the photo, that we started collaborating more seriously.

It’s been a few years since the summer of 2008 when you covered "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" by Fleet Foxes, which landed you a lot of attention. What was that experience like?

K: Really strange. We had released an EP in Sweden, but no one really knew of us outside of Sweden. It was really crazy to have all these people from all around the world seeing the video and [supporting us]. That made it so we could release our EP worldwide and go on tour. We quit school.

Was that a hard decision?

K: Honestly, no. I graduated from ninth grade and Johanna graduated from high school, and in Sweden you don't have to go to high school. You can take a year off, which was our plan at first. It wasn’t like, “Now we’re going to make music for the rest of our lives.” It was just like, “No we’re going to make music for a year." But then it started doing so well that we just kept doing it, and here we are.

If you could go back to 2008 and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?

J: I don’t know… I don't know if I would tell myself anything or do anything different. I think we’ve made the right choices. We’ve stuck with our gut feelings about music and who we are and what we want to do. Maybe I’d tell myself not to stress so much and not to worry, because it’s going to be alright in the end. But that’s kind of what you always want to tell yourself at all points in life.

You've worked with Mike Mogis from Bright Eyes. Klara, as a longtime Bright Eyes fan, I heard this was a big deal for you.

K: We've made two records with Mike now, The Lion’s Roar from 2012 and Stay Gold, which came out this year. It was incredible. We became friends with Mike through Conor Oberst because we gave him one of our records, and then they came to one of our shows. And we said, 'We would love to make a record with you, because you’re our dream producer.' And Mike wanted to make a record with us too, which was really kind of crazy.

But we’ve had such a good time together and we just see music the same way I think. And we’re all really enthusiastic about it, and we’re making it for the same reasons. It’s really great.

J: Conor and Mike are such sweet people, after being such big fans. Because some people say, 'Don’t meet your idols.' But it was great meeting them. They’re real people.

Were you nervous when you first met Conor?

J: Oh, so nervous! It was really awkward. We felt like we'd make fools out of ourselves.

K: We just didn't know what to say. When you meet someone like that whose music has meant so much to you, there’s not really anything you can say that really conveys that.

J: He had no idea who we were, we were just some band giving him a CD. The fact that he listened to it and showed up later... We had thought we’d messed up and that he’d never listen to it.

K: But then he showed up and now we’re just great friends. We’ve gotten to collaborate. And you change the way you think about people when you get to know them, and you realize they’re just real people and not your idols.

What are some other acts that have influenced you and helped you grow?

K: So many, I don't know where to start. We love a songwriter called Townes Van Zant, he’s just one of those people we always go back to and can find something new in his songs. And also Neko Case; we just find her really inspiring because she’s just so cool. And as women working in music, there’s just so much pressure on you to be a certain way. But she’s doing her own thing, and she’s doing it so well. I don’t look up to her just because she’s a woman, I look up to her because she’s one of the greatest songwriters in the world today. I just think her music is so, so incredible.

What’s your advice for making music in the Internet age?

J: Be really stubborn, because back in the MySpace day, I would add every single person I knew from the Swedish music industry as friends. So they would have to see our music spread in the first place. I added, like, thousands of people. So yeah, just be really stubborn. Also, just have fun. We’re so lucky — we didn’t have a plan, it kind of just all fell into place. But what people like about that video is that it’s really genuine, and we’re just having fun. It’s like we’re not even aware of the camera. That’s the thing you have to do whenever you make music: Try to be as honest with yourself as possible.

K: And interact with your fans as much as you can.

Anything you'd like to add?

K: Don’t judge us too harshly based on this picture. We’re just teenage girls. [laughs]

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